Charpentier (L) and Zhang (R).

Taipei, April 12 (CNA) Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the three winners of the 2016 Tang Prize in biopharmaceutical science, will give a keynote speech at Experimental Biology (EB) 2017 in San Diego in the United States on April 23, the Tang Prize Foundation said Wednesday.

The multidisciplinary scientific meeting will feature plenary sessions, lectures and exhibitions of an array of equipment, supplies and publications for research labs and experimental study.

EB is an annual meeting of over 14,000 scientists and exhibitors representing six sponsoring societies and many guest societies.

Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang (張鋒) won the Tang Prize last year for their contribution to "the development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a breakthrough genome editing platform that promises to revolutionize biomedical research and disease treatment."

At the EB conference, Charpentier will speak on "The bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system: a game changer in genome engineering," according to the Tang Prize Foundation.

Zhang, meanwhile, has been invited to address the annual meeting of the Foundation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), a gathering that is aimed at promoting exchanges and the ideas of Tang Prize winners in the international community, according to Tang Prize Foundation CEO Chern Jenn-chuan (陳振川).

Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute and Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley are vying with Zhang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the right to patent the CRISPR/Cas9 system.

The patent row has heated up in recent years with possibly hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars at stake, thanks to the introduction of CRISPR/Cas9 system, a genome editing platform that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by cutting out, replacing or adding parts to the DNA sequence.

(By Chen Chih-chung and S.C. Chang)
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